At 6:03 on the morning of June 3, 1950, the phone rang in Bumpy Johnson’s Harlem brownstone. He picked it up on the second ring, his voice still hoarse with sleep. Dr. Morris Chen of Harlem Hospital was on the line. Bumpy’s mother had been admitted. She had suffered a severe heart attack. She was … Read more

The air in the Villa Savoia was thick with Roman summer when the man who had ruled Italy for twenty-one years walked in for what he believed was a routine audience. Benito Mussolini was pale, tired, and still reeling from the previous night, when his own Grand Council had voted against him nineteen to seven. … Read more

For nearly three decades after his death, one of the most famous revolutionaries of the twentieth century lay in an unmarked grave that almost no one could find. Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia in October 1967, and the Bolivian government had buried him in secret, afraid that a known grave would become a … Read more

In the summer of 1942, Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler’s closest aide and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, received a letter from the head of the German railway system. The letter informed him that, following his personal request, a train capacity of 5,000 persons per day had been arranged for the transportation … Read more

The last Carol’s hamburger stand in America closed in 1981, but the name survives on a corporate letterhead, a stock ticker, and the paychecks of tens of thousands of employees. A company named after a Tasty Freeze executive’s daughter built roughly 150 hamburger stands across upstate New York and Pennsylvania, gave up its own name … Read more

The footsteps came slowly. That was the first thing anyone who witnessed it would remember afterward. Not the heat. Not the smell of cigarette smoke embedded in the walls of the staircase. Not the creak of worn wooden steps under the weight of expensive shoes. What they remembered was the pace. Deliberate. Unhurried. The footsteps … Read more

In the spring of 1977, a soft-spoken Irishman named Mickey Spillane walked into an ambush in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens. He was 53 years old, the man who had run New York’s Hell’s Kitchen for the better part of fifteen years, and he never saw it coming. The shooter was someone he trusted, a … Read more

On a Sunday in June of 1940, at Chequers, the country house of British prime ministers, Clementine Churchill sat down to write a letter to her husband. France had fallen. She tore the letter up. Days later, she gave it to him anyway. One of the men in his entourage, she wrote—a devoted friend—had come … Read more

In the late 1990s, Dave Mayhew, a young professional skateboarder from Wisconsin, walked into a Sports Authority and stopped in front of a hiking boot. It had oversized lace holes near the top. He wondered what those holes would look like running down the side of a skate shoe. He was twenty-four when that question … Read more